Obama's tone welcome in Middle East, change needs time

By Jonathan Wright - Analysis

CAIRO (Reuters) - The incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will make a welcome mark on the Middle East early with a new tone of dialogue and commitment to multilateral action, analysts and diplomats say.

But real change in U.S. foreign policy toward the region will take months or even years to come about as Obama feels his way through the complex conflicts which the outgoing Bush administration has created or allowed to fester.

While Arab governments see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the gravest underlying source of instability, the Obama administration is likely to put that low on its list of priorities, below Iraq and Iran for example, they said.

The Middle East as a whole will come way behind Obama's more pressing concerns at home -- stimulating the economy and unraveling the tangle of bad debt which helped create the worst global financial crisis in 80 years.

"People (in the Middle East) will have to measure their expectations... If your expectations are complete change then you are setting yourself up for disappointment," said Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere of the International Crisis Group think tank.

Walid Kazziha, a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, said Obama's unusual childhood -- having an African father and living in Indonesia -- should make him more responsive to the concerns of non-Americans.

"He is more likely to be humanistic in his approach. (Republican presidential candidate John) McCain was tense and confrontational. Obama is more open," he added.

SYMBOLIC SHIFT

Moroccan university professor Mahdi Elmandjra said: "We can see it (the election of Obama) as a certain evolution in favor of peace as an ideal for all humanity, without discrimination of race or religion." But he added: "We must not have illusions and expect drastic change in one go."

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East Center in Beirut, said Obama, the first African-American president, brought "an initial cultural symbolic shift."

"The relationship that has developed into a very ugly and tense one between the Islamic world and the United States, that shifted just by having a person like Obama on his way to the White House," he told Reuters.

But he added: "In terms of actual policies, the changes will probably not be very quick."

In 21 months of campaigning for the presidency, Obama made very few commitments on the Middle East, other than promising to reduce the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and offering dialogue without preconditions with Iran and Syria.

In his three campaign debates with John McCain, no one ever asked them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which turned out to be central to the foreign policy of the two previous Democratic presidents -- Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

But his policy advisers include Dennis Ross, Clinton's main Middle East mediator, whom the Palestinian side in peace talks saw as excessively pro-Israeli.